A group of children held at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Texas where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was kept have shared devastating details of their time in custody.
Hundreds of children are being held at the Dilley Immigration Center in South Texas, the designated ICE detention center for families detained by immigration agents.
In mid-January, a detainee at Dilley collected handwritten letters from children being held at the center at the request of a ProPublica reporter. When the detainee was released from custody on Jan. 20, they brought the letters with them, ProPublica reported Monday.
The letters described disgusting food, water that seemed to make people sick, inadequate schooling and medical care, indifferent guards, rooms crammed with three or more families each, and the anguish the children felt as their fellow detainees cried daily and received a steady stream of bad news from immigration judges.
“I’ve been detained for 45 days and I have never felt so much fear to go to a place as I feel here,” wrote a 14-year-old named Ariana. “Since I got to this Center, all you feel is sadness and mostly depression.”
She said she and her mother had lived in the U.S. for 7 years but are now separated from her younger siblings, who “are little and they need their mom and sister.” She added that she hasn’t received any schooling at Dilley, and that the detainees don’t have access to doctors, just nurses.
Many of the letters included heartbreaking portraits of the children and their relatives in custody, including a crayon drawing titled “My family” by a 5-year-old girl, Luisanney Toloza, who was apparently too young to write.
In a statement to ProPublica, the Department of Homeland Security said all detainees at Dilley were provided with proper medical care, three meals a day, clean water, clothing, bedding, showers, soap, and toiletries, and that certified dieticians evaluated the meals served there.
The statement also said children had access to teachers, classrooms, and materials for math, reading, and spelling. The company that operates the center, CoreCivic, told ProPublica that the facility was subject to multiple layers of oversight, and that health and safety were a top priority.
The Daily Beast has also reached out for comment.
Despite DHS’s assurances, the family of Liam, who became the face of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation drive after he was detained when returning home from preschool, still wearing his backpack and a blue bunny ears hat, described similar difficulties accessing medical care.
The boy became feverish and lethargic, and even vomited, but staff said they couldn’t give him any medicine because they didn’t have any, Liam’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, told ABC News.
The center was hit by a measles outbreak soon after Liam’s Feb. 1 release.
The children who sent letters to ProPublica said they had been told they would only be detained for 21 days, the maximum allowed under the Flores Settlement agreement, but wrote that they had been in Dilley for much longer.
“I miss my grandparents, I miss my friends, I don’t like the food here, I miss my school,” wrote 7-year-old Mia Valentina Pas Faria, who was living in Austin, Texas, and has been detained for 70 days.
Scarlett Jaimes, a 17-year-old from Venezuela who was living in El Paso, Texas, said it was “overwhelming” being “locked up against my will,” while 9-year-old Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya wrote that she felt like it was her fault she and her mother had ended up in detention.
Maria came to the U.S. from Venezuela on a tourist visa to visit her mother, who was living in the U.S. illegally. She was only supposed to be in the country for 10 days but had been in custody for 113 days when she wrote her letter.
“ICE used me to catch my mom and now I am in a jail and I am sad and I have fainted 2 times here inside,” she wrote. “When I arrived every night I cried and now I don’t sleep well, I felt that being here was my fault and I only wanted to be on vacation like a normal family.”
